SONA debate: Much still needs to be done to achieve meaningful growth

Note to editors: The following is an extract from a speech delivered by Dr Wilmot James MP during the State of the Nation debate in Parliament today.

Mr Speaker,

When President Zuma took office in 2009 he inherited relatively little government debt compared to the size of our economy. We had just emerged from a prolonged period of economic growth.

But, Mr Speaker, President Zuma faced a new challenge. The global economy headed into stormy waters with the collapse of the financial markets in the West. And we all agreed that government should take action to soften the blow.

Since then, Mr Speaker, President Zuma presided over the greatest expansion of government spending in our nation's history. And the result is that our debt is likely to reach levels close to those of the early 1990s.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) is of the view that the investment in infrastructure the President proposes is a very good idea. We welcome his invitation to involve the private sector and the substantial equity it commands.

This will be a considerable stimulus to achieve the high growth we need to provide the revenues to repay the debt.

But, Mr Speaker, this is not enough.

President Zuma also spoke at length about the success in improving education. And yet, as I speak now, one in three children sit without workbooks. There are provinces without new textbooks because some did not bother to order them on time and Limpopo did not order books at all.

There are thousands of children who went back to mud schools in the Eastern Cape despite the fact that Treasury provided enough money to replace them. Mr President, the initiative to replace the mud schools did not come from your government. It did not come from the Eastern Cape Education Department. It came from the poor parents in deep rural Eastern Cape who took your Government to court and won.

Speaker, the President referred to the improvement in the overall matric pass rate but failed to point out that the pass rate for mathematics, the sciences and some languages remains worryingly low. As a result, our universities will not be able to produce sufficient numbers of students with the engineering and technical skills your investment in infrastructure development requires.

The theme of the state of the nation address was "The Knowledge Economy and Development Opportunities". How is it, Mr President, that no reference was made to the knowledge economy, or of our universities or science-led innovation? Surely this merited some mention, given the planned investments in broadband and cellular communication infrastructure?

Speaker, I was shocked when President Zuma thanked all teachers' unions for their cooperation in improving the education of our children when we know full well how the power-hungry SADTU willfully sacrifices schooling on the altar of material greed, despite its socialist rhetoric. In the Eastern Cape, where matric pass rates are lowest, SADTU has just concluded a go-slow.

I was appalled at President Zuma's misrepresentation of the Grade 10 drop-out rate and his gratuitous jibe aimed at the best performing province - the Western Cape - based on a selective reading of material including the 2008-2010 General Household Survey.

Tell us, Mr President, how will we achieve high economic growth without declaring education to be in crisis and ramping up our grossly underperforming school system?

Tell us, Mr President, how will we achieve higher growth without an emergency skills programme for the trades to provide the talented young people without whom your plan will fail?

Tell us Mr President, how will we achieve higher growth without large-scale ideas-based innovation at universities, our science councils and research and development in our private sector?

We need to train more and better science and mathematics teachers.

We need to pull talented retired science and mathematics teachers out of retirement.

We should recruit mathematics and science teachers internationally and relax our immigration requirements accordingly.

We should rapidly rebuild our teacher training colleges. Start the exercise in Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape and build the two planned universities for those provinces on that basis.

Withdraw the misguided effort of Minister of Higher Education Dr Blade Nzimande to take control of the Further Education and Training (FET) Colleges. His Department lacks the capacity to look after the FET colleges.

Link every school into a national broadband backbone driven by President Zuma's investments in infrastructure.

Train all teachers in-service to use the most modern information and communication technology there is.

Oblige all trade unions and professional associations by law to spend at least half the funds they receive through payroll deduction on teacher training, development and services.

Devote a significant part of infrastructure spend to ensuring that universities have state-of-the-art libraries, science laboratories, intellectual property rights and discovery commercialisation offices, lecture halls and residences.

Ensure that our best academics are incentivised to be on top of their game and the best postgraduate students supported so that they never have to worry about where their next meal comes from.

Celebrate free, independent and analytically robust thinking. Make intellectual honesty the greatest virtue.

Eschew the politically correct nonsense that paralyses our nation's collective intellectual ability to find solutions to the problems we face, specifically poverty, unemployment and inequality. Mouthing slogans will not put bread into our peoples' mouths or create real jobs.

Speaker, why is it that other developing economies can grow at 6, 7, 8 or 9 percent and we can only stutter along at under 3%?

The reason is not hard to find. Read the National Development Plan.

What this nation needs is a President with clarity of vision, steeliness of conviction and the courage to take tough decisions.

Instead we have Mr Nice Guy with a charming smile, who tries to please everyone and so fails to be the leader we need in these challenging times.

Issued by the DA, February 15 2012

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